Metadata harvesting using agent technology

Abstract

Academic community is acutely in need of a unified and easily accessible library of MSc papers and PhD theses. The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) has been established in order to tackle this problem, and its primary goal is to establish the framework and standards for interchange of metadata. The OAI has adopted the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) as the standardised protocol for metadata harvesting. Metadata mining through the archives is by its very nature distributed, and as such represents a good basis for the agent technology. One case study of implementing agent framework for metadata harvesting in the context of OAI will be presented in this paper.